It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Between family, friends and the garden, boy, it’s been a busy year. This post will serve as a reminder to myself of the work we’ve accomplished with the plants.
For anyone new here, we grow roses from seed so we can develop our own in-house varieties to create plants from. And this was a very successful year for the seedlings we planted.
The Greenhouse Problem
This year we chose to do our planting indoors, under grow lights. The reason is that our Palram greenhouse just gets way too hot.
Last year (2025), we had a warm spring, and the seedlings could not perform in that environment. Even with all the windows and doors open and a 60% sunshade covering the greenhouse, it got up to 96 degrees Fahrenheit. So we were watering frequently to keep the seedlings from drying out.
That watering introduced its own problems, because the seedling trays didn’t dry out uniformly. The center of each tray held more water than the outer edges, so every time we watered, the center got too much and the soil became saturated. That is not an ideal environment for rose seedlings. Pair that with the cool nights we have in spring, and we got ourselves a great environment for root rot.
So we were left chasing the watering schedule, trying to keep the seedlings well hydrated without saturating the soil so much that disease set in. I was not very good at it, and we lost all of our plants.
Our Indoor Setup
For 2026, I harvested my seeds, and we began planting in February. We used 200-cell trays (seed trays divided into 200 small individual cells) so we could plant more seeds, since we had a great volume of seeds last year.
Each grow light was four feet long, enough to illuminate four trays at a time. We put the trays on two storage shelf units with five shelves each. That allowed us to plant 20 trays per shelf unit, or 40 trays total, which brought our initial planting capacity to 8,000 seeds.
We kept the seedlings in an environment between 54 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit, with the grow lights 9 inches above the soil to both warm the soil and fuel any starts (newly sprouted seedlings) that came up. I’m aware that grow lights aren’t necessary to get the seeds to sprout and that this might have been wasted energy. But based on the measurements I took, when the lights came on, the temperature in the grow room rose enough to offset the freezing temperatures outside.
Running Out of Room
Well, we ran past 8,000 seeds and ran out of space. To get warmth to the soil and force sprouting, I rotated trays in and out of the lights. That likely explains the strange intervals in our sprouting: we got some delayed sprouts instead of a more uniform bell curve.
In the end, we planted 11,000 seeds and had 800 viable starts at the conclusion of the schedule. That’s not to say we didn’t get many more starts. We did, but we had to transfer the ones that had already outgrown the seed trays, so we chose to cull (remove and discard) the remaining seeds. I’d estimate we got closer to 1,500 to 2,000 sprouts after all was said and done. Sadly, everything above those 800 was dumped on the ground with the soil, and since they were unlabeled, recovering them wasn’t viable.
That’s a lesson to account for next growing season. I need another shelf unit and five more grow lights.
The Growth Study
Of those 800, we kept only the 404 that showed no disease when we transferred them to one-gallon pots in mid-May. That’s when the evaluation really began. Every week, we took photos of each plant, its blooms and its growth habit (the plant’s overall shape and the way it grows), and tracked whether it had bloomed. Each week, the rankings changed.
Stress-Testing All 404 Plants
These plants were not treated nicely. In fact, all 404 of them were moderately abused through the summer. Because of our location in the Pacific Northwest, we want plants that can take heavy rain and also survive a dry summer, so we set out to abuse them in a similar fashion.
We intentionally overwatered. Some plants were strong water consumers, while others barely drank a sip, but every one of them got watered vigorously whether it needed it or not. Then we let them dry out. Some did well, and others did not. Of course, some died over the course of this operation.
The First Cull
We ran the weekly ranking system until late August, then separated out the top-ranked 29%, or 119 plants. Some plants looked great and would have made the cut, but they had yet to bloom. We wanted prolific bloomers, so we chose to cull the ones that had terrific growth but no blooms during the study period.
From that point on, we meticulously continued the weekly photo rankings and cataloged the blooms.
The Second Cull
Now we’re in mid-October, and it’s time to transfer the plants into the ground. NOAA’s winter outlook favors a warmer-than-normal winter for the Pacific Northwest this year, which is great for roses that need to be planted in the ground and grow roots that will sustain them through the frost that’s likely to come in January and February.
We’ll likely keep only the top 30 plants from the study and continue monitoring them monthly to see how they perform in the ground. That’s the work ahead of us.
What’s Next
We’re also at the point where we need to harvest this year’s seeds and move them to the fridge to stratify (a period of cold storage that mimics winter and gets the seeds ready to sprout). With the number of seed pods we have this year, I have no doubt we’ll match or even surpass last year’s seed harvest.
If you have roses of your own, now is a great time to get out in your garden and clean up any debris before winter, like fallen foliage and damaged rose stems.
That does it for this update. I’ll post again after our seed harvest.
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